While the U.S. population grew by 100M people in the past 40 years, the EPA budget shrank 55%.

Editor’s note: A longer version of this post first appeared in The Hill. When Donald Trump rolled out his budget, which cut the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency more than any other department, he said his goal was to shrink our “bloated federal bureaucracy.” He clearly meant to leave the impression that the EPA had gotten too big and costly. Not surprisingly for a president who just told his 2,000th lie in less than a year in office, this rationale is flat-out wrong. Far from growing too big, EPA’s budget has been devastated. Other than a bump in the early Obama administration, the agency’s funding has been in a downward spiral for the past four decades. 100 million more Americans – but a decimated EPA Contrary to Trump’s implication, EPA’s budget in real dollars is now less than half of what it was in the late 1970s – even as our population since then increased by 100...